Last month’s 11th Annual LA 3-D Movie Festival was a rousing success! From the opening night with OK Go (which featured a special added screening of AL’S BRAIN 3D by Weird Al Yankovic) to the closing night experimental feature ABOVE US ALL, the films and events at the 11th fest made it the best one yet.
I want to thank everyone who made the festival happen. First, thanks to all of the filmmakers whose wonderful work we were able to show during the fest, and to the filmmakers in attendance who joined us for our Q&A swssions.
Thank you to Damian Kulash and Tim Nordwind from OK Go, and to director Trish Sie, for paricipating in an engaging evening of 3-D music videos and clips. Thanks also to Weird Al Yankovic and his management for arranging for our special showing of AL’S BRAIN, and to Peter Anderson for providing the DCP.
A great big thank you to Ben Dickow and the rest of Captured Aural Phantasy Theater for giving us a fantastic live 3-D comic book performance.
Thanks to our food sponsors Kalye Hits, Spitz, and Pitfire Pizza. Their donated goodies made our holiday reception so delicious. And to our prize sponsors Sony Creative Software, FrameForge, and Berezin 3-D Products for generously providing the prizes for our award winners.
The festival couldn’t have happened without the hard work of a number of LA 3-D Club members who volunteered their time at the theater. Jodi Kurland organized everything that went on in the lobby, ran the boxoffice, and oversaw the reception. Barry Rothstein supervised our vendors area. Shannon Benna, in addition to volunteering during the fest, also curated and moderated the presentation of student 3-D films, contacting the schools and student filmmakers, and handling all of the tasks that went into making that program so great. Other members who put extra effort into working at the festival include Oliver Dean, Susanne Kerenyi, Ed Ogawa, Shyam Kannapurakkaran, Jeff Amaral and Lawrence Kaufman.
We are grateful to New Europe Film Sales, the distributors of ABOVE US ALL, who granted us permission to show the movie. We also owe a debt of gratitude to the technical team at Barco, makers of the theater’s projector and cinema server. Our closing night film was very unique, filmed in 3-D at 50 frames per second. When we first received the files for the movie, they wouldn’t play properly because that frame rate is a new option that wasn’t yet available in the US. Engineers at Barco Europe contacted their counterparts in California, and provided us with the firmware update for the server that allowed the film to play flawlessly.
A great BIG thank you, of course, to Jim Kirst, Laura Stokes, Gus Aldana, Austin Wolf-Sothern, and the rest of the team at the Downtown Independent. This was the fifth year that they opened their doors for us to present our programs of unique 3-D content, and we really appreciate it.
And finally, thank you to everyone who attended. Those who showed up in costume for our presentation of COSPLAY DREAMS 3-D, the cast and crew of HACKIN’ JACK vs. THE CHAINSAW CHICK, and everyone who came out to support the festival and share a weekend of the best independent 3-D movies from around the world.
